Sun-Worship and False Gods: Understanding the Language of Völkisch Religion in the Nazis' "Recommended Reading"

This paper considers the manner in which völkisch ideas on religion permeated the Nazi movement, through an analysis of the Nazis’ own ‘recommended reading.’ While there has certainly been a renaissance of study into the Nazi Party and religion in recent years, one of the major challenges still facing historians is the identification of dominant trends from the earlier völkisch movement that fed into the Nazi movement. Indeed, this paper is driven by the key question: what were the Nazis reading? While this is often very difficult to ascertain, we can be far more certain about which texts the Nazis were recommending to their own members. In particular, I am considering the texts that were advertised and reviewed in the official newspaper of the NSDAP (the Völkischer Beobachter), with a special focus on ‘religious’ texts that were promoted in this paper to 1923. Through a series of case-studies, the paper demonstrates that a ‘common language’ or Gemeinsprache of religion already existed within early Nazi discourse and that this drew on a series of prominent antisemitic authors. This, in turn, led to the development of a cultural code that was self-referential and which assumed a mutual understanding based on the writings of such authors: including sun-worship as a basis for ‘Aryan’ religion, the idea of a ‘pagan cross,’ and that Yahweh was a ‘false god.’ This ‘language’––because it is also esoteric––was simultaneously a kind of ‘secret language’ (Geheimsprache) to those not cognizant with völkisch literature. It could be understood readily enough by those reading widely in völkisch works at the time, but those readers are long dead. As a result, it has also not been fully understood in the historiography, though it formed a part of the conceptual framework for Nazism. In particular, the paper proposes that in the formational years of the Nazi Party the single most important text on religion was Theodor Fritsch’s The False God. This text in itself was repeatedly recommended in the Nazis’ newspaper. More importantly, it was regularly cited and quoted by any number of other authors regardless of their position on religion, whether it was occult, pagan, pagan-Christian, or a kind of ‘aryanised’ Christian faith. The paper then simultaneously seeks to understand the language of völkisch religion and its influence in the Nazi Party, and acts as a call to further work in re-discovering this Gemein/Geheim-sprache.